Back from the dead

When AUFS was still called Cinergi, and before Facebook existed, we had a website, archived as it was in 2001 here. Then at some point in the late 2000s, it slowly became outdated, until it's last known appearance, on the 28th of August 2010.

Today, almost 20 years later, we're launching our very own website, a place to share the activities and films of the society, answer your questions, show what we'll be doing throughout the year, and generally act as a hub for all things AUFS.

Features

This is actually a relatively complex website, especially for a society our size (in fact this is probably the most sophisticated fully student-run website in Aberdeen). The major features it offers are:

• Blog: To keep you updated about our activities.
• Film database: All our terrible amazing films now have an official home, like IMDB but without the vote brigading. Here we can display, curate, and organize them way better than on our YouTube channel, and show some cool Behind The Scenes info and pics about each short.
• FAQ+About Us: A little more boring, but this is important for those of you who don't yet know about our society.
• Productions: The cozy home to understand, keep updated and see what AUFS Productions is all about.
• Voting platform: Now this is exciting. Basically we'll be able to run real-time polls during meetings that you guys can vote on by going to the vote page, while we project the results in real-time. It's a pretty cool and fun way to make decisions during meetings, ask people what they think, or decide who the winners are at our wee award shows.

Open-source

For the few of you curious about how this website works behind the scenes, you can view the source code on GitHub. Briefly, it's all powered by a Node.js app, without any extra frameworks other than express. Most of the data (posts, films, etc...) is stored on a MySQL database.

All of this is running on a server in Edinburgh, which belongs to a Britsh shared hosting provider, meaning we're able to spend very little society money to get it working.